Your Company Needs a Strategy for Voice Technology

Executive Summary

Voice assistants, smart speakers, and all manner of voice-first technology are enjoying remarkable growth and adoption. Much like the web back in the ‘90s, voice AI now represents a vast ocean of possibilities and potential. As voice assistants become more context-driven, they’ll also become more proactive, finding new ways to serve us and improve our lives, while also challenging our notions of privacy and security. It won’t be long before every company will be expected to own and manage its own voice-first presence and capabilities, much like every company is expected to own and manage their web presence and capabilities. The emergence of voice, which serves as the front door for artificial intelligence and machine learning, is already making a mark on a wide variety of industries. Companies that aren’t paying attention to voice now are sure to lose customers going forward.

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Voice assistants, smart speakers, and all manner of voice-first technology have enjoyed remarkable growth and adoption. Voicebot.AI reports that the smart speaker install base within the U.S. grew 40% from 2018 to 2019, now exceeding 66 million units. International markets have grown even more dramatically — Dutch adoption of smart speakers exploded from 0% to 5% in just four and a half months, for example, with no sign of slowing down.

Insight Center

Voice-first doesn’t mean voice-only, though. Smart speakers with screens — generally referred to as “smart displays” — are surging in popularity as well. In January of 2018, there were 1.3 million smart display owners in the U.S., and by the end of the year, that number had risen to 8.7 million — an increase of 558%. Products like Amazon’s Echo Show and the Google Home Hub upped the ante on expectations for voice-first technology.

The emergence of voice, which serves as the front door for artificial intelligence and machine learning, is already making a mark on a wide variety of industries. Consider these examples:

Voice-enabled games have come so far that Drivetime.FM, a Bay Area startup, raised $4 million in seed funding to create voice-first games to be played exclusively in the car.

Beyond Alexa and Google Home

While mainstream voice assistants like Alexa and Google Home have been carving out a significant share of the smart speaker market, an equal market has been created for voice-first technology that eschews the major tech companies in favor of a more private, data-secure approach. Kansas City-based Mycroft successfully crowdfunded more than $1 million from over 1,500 investors to deliver Mycroft AI, an open voice ecosystem which differentiates itself with a localized, secure architecture that avoids sending data back to Silicon Valley tech giants.

Much like the web back in the ‘90s, voice represents a vast blue ocean of possibilities and potential. As voice assistants become more context-driven, they’ll become more proactive, rather than just reactive. They’ll find new ways to serve us and improve our lives, while also finding new ways to challenge our notions of privacy and security.

What matters right now is for companies to test voice-first technology for themselves and begin to learn what works for their business and what doesn’t. Start by assigning an internal champion or hiring an external partner to develop a pilot voice experience for your organization. That initial experience can then be discussed internally, shared externally at conferences, and built upon for future growth. A good initial project might be to take aspects of your company’s website, or other individual components of your company’s branding, and build a voice experience around those before moving on to more vanguard uses of voice-first technology.

Companies that aren’t paying attention to voice are already getting burned. For example, this recent report from Forbes, which my company spearheaded, shows that major publishers could be losing as much as $46,000 per day — $17 million over the course of 2019 — due to voice tech failing to help consumers buy the books they want. This loss could balloon to upwards of $50 million in 2020. Don’t wait for a similar report to come out for your industry — now is the time to invest, while voice-enabled purchasing is still new and not as widely adopted.

It won’t be long before every company will be expected to own and manage its own voice-first presence and capabilities, much like every company is expected to own and manage their web presence and capabilities. In fact, every time you see someone asking Siri to give them information, or someone asking Google Assistant for directions, you’ll realize that your customers are already way ahead of you.